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This story was collected for the People's War Site by Lananh Nguyen at the Plaistow Resource Centre on behalf of Doris Brooks and has been added to the site with her permission. Doris Brooks fully understands the site's terms and conditions.
The story was submitted to the site by CSV volunteer Laya Sasikumar.

My husband Sydney died last February. During the war he had fought in the Queen’s Royal Regiment and was a builder prior to that.

He was captured as a prisoner of war in Italy in 1942, and was then sent to Germany two and a half years later. We sent letters to each other about once a month, and Sydney wrote about day-to-day events like the weather and his condition. I think he was treated fairly as a prisoner, although some information on letters he sent were blacked out by censors.

I was allowed to send him up cigarettes and used to send a pack of 500 cigarettes which used to be sold for five and sixpence. I did this a couple of times, but strangely they never reached my husband and probably ended up with the guards. Sydney returned from the war in 1945 — although he was happy to be back, his feet were covered with blisters. He never spoke about the war when he returned. He never said anything.

Around June 1940 I started a job at Standard Telephones where I was making parts for boats. This included working with my hands to do tasks such as light soldering. At first the company wanted staff to do day and night shifts, but when the bomb sirens went off early in the mornings they realised that they were paying staff for doing no work. They soon stopped the night-shifts.

I worked at the same company for six years. As I lived alone, I was asked to fire watch in the evenings as well. This meant that I had to look out for incendiary bombs from the top of the bomb shelter. Once the sirens went off, you got dressed, put your hat on and went looking for incendiary bombs. It was very cold during the night.
I was never actually shown how to work the stirrup pump so if there had been a bomb, I wouldn’t have known what to do!

Sometimes the bombing was really bad. People relied heavily on their shelters because often they would come out of their dugouts to find that their houses had been completely destroyed by the bombs.

However people did not really seem to be afraid. Even if they were they didn’t really show it, and just seemed to carry on as normal. Even at the beginning of the war, when air-raids would happen while you were out shopping, people just seemed calmed and collected.

I felt really sorry for Sydney’s mother. She had six sons and they were all in the forces — three in the RAF and three in the Army. Fortunately they all survived and came home at the end of the war. When ‘the boys’ came back they would all come over to our place and play our billiard table. We were all very close, but at the time the only thing we could afford was salmon and shrimp paste sandwiches.

A lot of people went missing during the war. My brother was in the forces in Burma, and went missing. My mother worried so much that her hair started to fall out. She tried Vaseline and tonics to stop her from loosing hair. My brother was shot in the shoulder by a sniper in a tree in 1944.

My friend’s husband also went missing. In those days people didn’t have phones, so we contacted Alexandra Palace, as it was where you could get information about missing soldiers. She found out that he had been a ‘Prisoner of War’ in Singapore, and was murdered so he never came back.

I’m still very bitter about the war. It took six years of our lives that we can never get back.

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